I TOOK A TABLE in La Biela cafe, in the
fashionable Barrio Norte. As lunchtime
approaches, the cafe earns its name, "the
connecting rod," spinning with the com
ing and going of politicians and businessmen
on the make, beautiful women, schemers and
plotters, shoeshine men, and gaunt beggars.
But now at midmorning it was quiet.
I opened the morning paper, turning to the
shipping pages. There is a special pleasure in
being in a port city and reading that yesterday
arrived the Prosperity, Liberian flag, from
New York, and the Jan Dlugosz, Polish flag,
from Japan, and departed the same day the
S. Caboto, Italian flag, for Genoa. The notices
hold the scent ofthe sea, a hundred miles down
the broad estuary known as the Rio de la Plata,
the "river of silver," which can also be trans
lated "river of money."
The first Spanish settlement here was
attempted in 1536; besieged by Indians, the
settlers were reduced to eating snakes, rats,
their shoes, even the flesh of dead companions,
before abandoning the place. In 1580 the
Spanish tried again; this time the port of Nues
tra Sefiora Santa Maria del Buen Aire-Our
Lady Holy Mary of the Good Air- was firmly
rooted, the Indians subjugated.
"Ifeelit tobe aseter
nal as air and water,"
Jorge Luis Borges,
Argentina's poet
laureate, wrote of
Buenos Aires. The
metropolis is home
to 11 million people
-- one-third of the
Argentine population.
A bulge in the Ria
chuelo, lower left,
became part of the
region'sfirst port and
inspired the name
residents use for
themselves: portefios.
But Spain fixed its gaze on the riches of Peru
and Mexico rather than on this remote back
water. The portenos, port dwellers, of Buenos
Aires dabbled in contraband; a taste for the
illegal, it is said, became a characteristic.
In time, with independence and commercial
links with Britain, Buenos Aires flourished.
From 1880 to the 1930s the port sent out the
bounty of the vast Pampas that stretch to the
west: hides, beef, wool, wheat, corn, grains.
The money flowed in. "Rich as an Argen
tine" became a saying. Portefios visiting
Europe brought back architects to create for
them great houses and streets as in Paris, an
opera house like Vienna's; they ordered
English tweeds and French silks. At the same
time, hundreds of thousands of Spanish and
Italian immigrants poured in seeking their for
tunes. The great city swelled and swelled
until, Argentines said, it was like a monster - a
head too great for the size of the nation-body.
The metropolitan area now sprawls over
1,500 square miles and holds 11 million
people-a third of the country's population.
The central city bespeaks the golden age:
Paris-like streets, sidewalk cafes, thousands
of shops-simple and elegant-schoolgirls
dressed in plaid skirts and dark blue sweaters
and stockings, porteros minding the entrances
to countless apartment houses.
Only the occasional ombu tree, its branches
spreading over 50 yards and its huge roots
twisting and writhing across the surface,
reminds you that you are in South America.
In such a splendid city, drawing on the
bounty of such a productive land, it is diffi
cult to imagine things going bad, but they
did.
"The problems came," said Professor
Roberto Cortes Conde of the Universidad de
San Andres in suburban Victoria, "after the
Second World War. Argentina, under Per6n,
adopted policies to close our economy to the
world, to protect our industries from foreign
competition, and to enable the government to
intervene strongly in the economy. The idea
was to isolate Argentina from world shocks
such as depression and the two World Wars.
Per6n believed there would be a third.
"And so, while in the 1950s and '60s much
of the world moved ahead, we lagged behind.
Our infant industries remained infant indus
tries, subsidized by the government. Inflation
began its climb. In a way the government
began to cheat the people, and the people to
cheat the government."